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Now that we have a Community Bulletin, we use it to highlight questions (more precisely scripts/apps/libraries) which deserve to be highlighted. All we ♦ moderators need to do is slap a tag on the question and it will get some extra attention.

Our idea was to have a Script/App/Library of the Month, not unlike Arqade has a Screenshot of the Week and Photography had a Photo of the Week. Since Stack Apps does not see a lot of traffic, we thought a month would be more appropriate.

Of course, we are not in the best position to determine which questions deserve this honour, but we've provided an example. This is definitely something we should do together as a community, and therefore we invite you to

  1. Submit scripts, apps and libraries you feel worthy of being featured as answers to this question, preferably with a short motivation. Use the following format:
    [tag:script/app/library]
    
    ## [Name of script, app, or library](URL to Stack Apps post)
    
    Motivation for choosing this script, app, or library
    
  2. Vote on other answers to this question to determine if a script/app/library gets featured and in which order.

Each month, we will feature the question with the highest voted answer that hasn't been featured yet. An answer needs to have positive score to qualify so that we know somebody else than the post author finds it useful (enough to be featured).

When we apply or remove the tag, we will save the question to the Wayback Machine to preserve the view count for analysis. Here are the results after a year:

Month Question Before After Views Remarks
February 2022 LegacyQuestions - Bringing back the old questions design 534 889* 355 (up to March 10th)
March 2022 Stack Exchange One-Click Reviews 147 188 41
April 2022 AutoReviewComments - Pro-forma comments for SE 21291 21374* 83 (up to May 5th)
May 2022 Activity Indicator - see if you participated in a Q&A at a glance 92 143* 51 (up to June 16th)
June 2022 Non-English Language Question Analyser 266 304 38
July 2022 Restore syntax highlighting on review and revision pages 111 147 36
August 2022 Custom Fonts User Script: Revert or Improve the Font Updates 1249 1335* 86 (up to September 26th)
September 2022 Stack Exchange Global Flag Summary 1475 1526 51
October 2022 Stack Exchange Global Review Summary 237 268 31
November 2022 Stack Overflow Extras (SOX) 5755 5801 46
December 2022 Optionally Anonymised Short Links 74 111 37
January 2023 Stack Exchange Global Types - a type declaration package for global objects exposed by Stack Exchange 336 371 35

Not really spectacular, if you ask me, but even 30 views is a nice boost for posts which otherwise would get only half a dozen views (in a month). There's no shortage of room in the Featured sidebar widget, so as long as interesting posts keep coming, we can feature them. Eventually, we could decide to re-feature contenders which have already been featured ... let us know what you think in the comments.

8
  • 1
    Once one does get featured, can you please edit the answer to say so? This way we know which ones were past featured and which ones are potential future candidates.
    – gparyani
    Commented Aug 31, 2022 at 3:08
  • 1
    Good idea! All of the entries have been featured, so the experiment might be coming to an end soon.
    – Glorfindel
    Commented Aug 31, 2022 at 6:05
  • @Glorfindel given that our site is not particularly active, and the most content is generated by the handful of likely candidates for the "script of the month", maybe we should reformat to, in the absense of nominations, featuring by score? Maybe even with creating nominations ourselves - this way there's also no conflict of interest if the developer and the poster happens to be one.
    – 0Valt
    Commented Sep 1, 2022 at 12:43
  • 2
    @OlegValteriswithUkraine some users have already self-nominated (which is fine, given that you can't vote on it). I'm not sure what you mean by Featuring by score, though I guess we can re-feature scripts which have already been featured.
    – Glorfindel
    Commented Sep 1, 2022 at 13:02
  • @Glorfindel yeah, the conflict of interest part is a minor point - I personally don't like self-promotion on principle, so that's why I mentioned it (and it is likely that others don't nominate for a similar reason). As for featuring by score, I meant that we could sort the posts tagged with [script], filter out those that don't work anymore, and, if no nominatuons come up, just feature whatever is next in queue. Someone could also keep an eye on it and make nomination posts when necessary (I am pretty active, for example, so I can supervise that). Refeaturing is also an interesting idea.
    – 0Valt
    Commented Sep 1, 2022 at 14:59
  • Is a new question for 2023 going to be posted?
    – Ethan
    Commented Jan 7, 2023 at 3:06
  • 1
    @Ethan it's on my to-do list. Meanwhile, other entries keep being posted here, so we might deviate from the original plan.
    – Glorfindel
    Commented Jan 7, 2023 at 8:18
  • 1
    @Ethan with a few answers still being on the 'to-be-featured' list, it might be best to keep the question as it is (I did add some analytics tonight). If you disagree and have good arguments to create a new question, please let us know :)
    – Glorfindel
    Commented Feb 19, 2023 at 19:38

22 Answers 22

11

(featured in February)

Legacy Questions: Bringing Back The Old Questions Design

I'm not the maker of this script, but it's the best.

Most people don't love the new questions design, the -473 upvotes will tell. This fixes that, which, in my mind makes it worthy of a feature. In lieu of an option to use the legacy questions, this is a great script.

7

(featured in June 2024)

Let's try to make a success of the Staging Ground. If that UX comes under powered for reviewers, the users that will make or break the staging ground, they need support. If that comes by user script so be it.

Let's make everyone aware scripts like these View other OP posts in the Staging Ground exist.

5

(featured in March)

One-Click Reviews

Having to make two clicks every time you make a review in a review queue can be really annoying and time-consuming. This is especially so if you're making a review that requires selecting an additional option (Close, Leave Closed, Recommend Deletion, etc.).

As such, I wrote this user script that immediately submits your review (or opens the respective dialog) when you click on a review option, so you can make your reviews quicker. This also restores the pre-2021 behavior of the review queues, which would automatically submit when choosing an option.

5

(featured in July)

Restore syntax highlighting on review and revision pages

Fixes this annoying bug reported in MSO that disables syntax highlighting on suggested edits and revisions.

5

(featured in April)

AutoReviewComments - Pro-forma comments for SE

One of the first scripts I ever installed, and it has been a major productivity saver ever since. When moderating sites (as a regular user as well as a moderator), some situations come up over and over again and can benefit from a standard comment from this script. You can even add your own standard ones or modify the existing templates.

It's a pity that it's no longer maintained (various users, including me, have their own personal forks now). But even in its current form it's worth giving a try.

5

(featured from June until August 2023)

Stack Exchange in read-only mode

In light of recent announcements by the company who owns these sites, it seems like this script is going to come in handy over the next couple of days/weeks.

4

(featured in September)

Global Flag Summary

Allows one to see their moderator flag status from every site in one unified place. This is especially useful for Charcoal users who've enabled autoflagging on many sites to see how their flags are being used on all of those sites without having to go through and check each and every one of them.

It also has the side effect of being useful for earning badges for visiting a site for certain consecutive days, as loading one's flag summary page on a site counts as a site visit.

1
4

(featured in October)

Stack Exchange Global Review Summary

As a semi-active reviewer its nice to see how many total reviews I have done with out needing to go to each queue and add them up manually.

And since it is built off of the flag summary I think it will also count as you visiting the site it help you get the the fanatic and enthusiast badges.

4

(featured in November)

Stack Overflow Extras (SOX)

Unlike the name suggests it can be used for all of SE. It has a bunch of features like showing your helpful flag percentage on your recent flags page, changes to the UI, and a lot more. Some things in the script are in other user scripts but this combines a bunch of those and some unique features into one.

4

(featured in January 2023)

Stack Exchange Global Types

Contains type definition for the vast majority of the StackExchange.* methods with a short description for each one. Useful for userscript authors that want to avoid implementing something that SE already has.

3

(featured in June)

Non-English Language Question Analyser

I like apps that assists us in curating content. This one reports stuff it finds in chat and is extendable for what it needs to find.

3

(featured in December)

Optionally Anonymised Short Links

Resurrected Anonymize short links userscript allowing the "share" button to operate anonymously (natively, it appends the current user id to the short post link). The updated version can also be persistently configured to use either the anonymized or native links.

Might not look like much on the first glance, but it saves a bunch of trouble when adding links to posts where the current user id would be inappropriate (various FAQs, for example).

3

(featured in February 2023)

Stack Review Suggested Edits Rework

An amazing script that completely revamps the suggested edits review queue UI and makes reviewing much easier.

3

(featured in December 2023)

Toasty

(self-nomination, I hope that's allowed)

Toasty is a bot which automatically sends messages in low-activity chat rooms to keep them from freezing, controlled by a nice web interface. I made this out of annoyance at my rooms being frozen and displeasure with the existing antifreeze bot options. It's usable by anyone with 200+ rep on any network site.

2

(featured in May)

Activity Indicator - see if you participated in a Q&A at a glance

A beneficial script if you're active across multiple sites.

And even if the script doesn't seem that useful to you, looking at the source, how it is organized and build for distribution is worth mentioning. I can learn a lot from that alone.

2

(featured in March 2023)

Custom Sidebar Links

I wrote this, and it was suggested by Tinkeringbell. It lets the user add custom links to the left sidebar. By default, it includes a link to Stack Overflow Teams (and a link to Google), although they can be changed to whatever the user wants to link to. Given that Teams was removed from the sidebar, being able to add it back is (hopefully!) useful.

2

(featured in May 2023)

Voting activity tracker v2: check your voting activity on per-site meta!

Because we need to encourage maintainers that revisit their apps and update to a new version.

2

Stack Exchange data dump downloader and transformer

Tool for downloading and optionally converting the SE data dump to (currently two) different formats, as a workaround for SE not providing a "download all" button.

(Also about to be very current given that October is the release month for the September 2024 data dump)

1

(featured in August)

Custom Fonts User Script: Revert or Improve the Font Updates

We have a lot of revert scripts lately. Not sure what causes that. Among those the one to control the fonts used is popular, given its score. I therefore propose it as a script to be featured.

1

(featured in September 2023)

I want to bring Calling SE APIs with Nushell (basic overview) to your attention. I love libraries that make data easier accessible. Specially when many parties run with this data to come up with convincing stats.

1

(featured in November 2023)

Small UI tweaks warrant attention as well, specially in those underused features like the timeline.

I propose we put Question and Answer Icon Annotations in Reputation History center stage for a month.

1

UI changes for long time users have historically been received with skepticism.

So we have "un-move the cheese" scripts. Hors Catégorie.

Hide the newly introduced homepage widgets

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